For the past few days, I’ve been hanging out in Rio at ICLR 2026. I’ll do my best to pontificate on my trip to Rio in a longer post, but one of the highlights of the trip thus far has been a talk by Alec Radford. Three things that struck me about his talk:

1. His initial work (on DC-GANs, which, inexplicably, won the test of time) was mostly done in an era when people didn’t really care about AI. We started working around the same time, when we all more-or-less either knew each other or of each other. I wonder if such an achievement (a full-blown, rather novel, almost crowd-sourced paper) could be done today.
2. FFS, this guy is my age; like, I was vaguely aware of that, but FFS. I’ve wasted my life.
3. Somehow, I don’t think I’ve crossed paths with him before, but his mannerisms, his way of speaking, even the way he dresses and walks reminded me so unnervingly of AZ. It sounded so familiar that I feel like I’ve known him for ages!